There's an extended thinking mode for GPT 5.2 i forget the name of it right at this minute. It's super slow - a 3 minute opus 4.5 prompt is circa 12 minutes to complete in 5.2 on that super extended thinking mode but it is not a close race in terms of results - GPT 5.2 wins by a handy margin in that mode. It's just too slow to be useable interactively though.

I mostly used Sonnet/Opus 4.x in the past months, but 5.2 Codex seemed to be on par or better for my use case in the past month. I tried a few models here and there but always went back to Claude, but with 5.2 Codex for the first time I felt it was very competitive, if not better.

Curious to see how things will be with 5.3 and 4.6

Interesting. Everyone in my circle said the opposite.

I pretty consistently heard people say Codex was much slower but produced better results, making it better for long-running work in the background, and worse for more interactive development.